Onlook

What it does

The Onlook home page says "No mockups to rebuild" and "Your work never drifts from what ships." Onlook lets designers work directly in code. The company calls its target user a Visual Engineer, which its docs define as someone who designs and builds production software directly in code, using visual tools, AI agents and engineering systems.

Today Onlook is a Mac desktop app; the architecture docs (as of 2026-10-26) describe it as an Electron app for Apple silicon Macs. Per the architecture docs, the user picks a local code folder and Onlook makes a git worktree copy in its own data folder, on a new branch off main. It installs dependencies with the project's own package manager, starts the app with the project's own dev command, and shows the running pages as frames on a canvas. Changes are requested in a side chat; a Claude Code or ChatGPT agent edits the copy, and the result appears on the canvas right away. A status pill in the top bar then steps through commit, push and pull request.

That's a different design from where Onlook started. The onlook-dev/onlook repo is the original open-source editor: it ran Next.js plus Tailwind projects in a web container in the browser, showed the preview in an iframe, and instrumented the code so on-screen elements mapped back to source, writing drag-and-drop and style edits straight into the code. In the developer docs’ own words, the guides for that editor “have been retired, because Onlook has moved on to the desktop app.” The repo is still public, with its README, Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml in place, but “The new desktop app is a different codebase,” and its source and developer guides will appear only when it is open-sourced “in the coming weeks.”

The version history explains the overlap. The repo began as an Electron desktop editor. In April 2025 a browser-based web editor landed on main, and in May 2025 the Electron code moved off main into a separate onlook-dev/desktop repo, created on 2025-05-15 and last pushed on 2025-07-17. Every release on the old repo’s Releases page, up to the last one, v0.2.32 (2025-07-18), carries Electron installers for Mac, Windows and Linux. The web editor itself never shipped an installer; the only self-hosting route the docs mention is the Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml in the repo. That web editor is what the docs now call the older browser-based Onlook. Today’s Mac app is also built on Electron, according to the architecture docs, but it shares code with neither of those lines.

Who makes it: the company is On Off, Inc. (per the site footer), founded in 2024 and part of YC Winter 2025. The YC page says the founders are Daniel Farrell, a designer for more than a decade, and Kiet Ho, a former Amazon and ServiceNow engineer. Daniel was among the first 100 employees at scooter company Bird, cofounded the long-distance ridesharing project Wanderlift, and was Head of Growth at DIMO. Kiet started the company in January 2024 and found Daniel through YC’s cofounder matching platform. The onlook-dev GitHub org was created on 2024-01-21 and the main repo on 2024-06-25. The team calls itself The Odyssey, and its hiring process includes a paid work trial. Daniel’s GitHub profile still lists Onlook.com; Kiet’s profile now names Superset as the current project.

The product has gone through roughly three phases. In 2024 it was an open-source Electron desktop editor. In 2025 it became a browser-based web editor with AI chat and one-click hosting; the YC launch post described starting a new app from a prompt or importing an existing NextJS/Tailwind app. In 2026 it became today’s locally run Mac app, which hands the AI work to the user's own Claude Code or ChatGPT agent.

Onlook is a free, local-first editor where designers craft exceptional experiences in code.